Museum Worlds

Perhaps the most serious challenge facing humanity in 2024 is the climate crisis. Museums are inextricably entwined with this issue, not just through their current advocacy for climate action through exhibitions and programs but also through the lessons that can be gleaned from their collections and how they were and are managed and interpreted. In the past, museums tended to represent the natural world set apart from humans. Natural history museums and anthropology museums were separate institutions, dividing up material culture between them, and managing, curating, cataloging, and displaying objects and specimens in different ways, with the result that connections between the human and nonhuman worlds were overlooked, even in the case of Indigenous people whose ways of being embraced the environment. The Museum of Zoology and Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) at the University of Cambridge, for example, are across the street from one another, but, as Jack Ashby points out (Ashby 2024, this volume), “the historic practices of each of their underpinning disciplines have divided their collections and institutional narratives in far more significant ways.”

Addressing the legacies of colonial collections and enabling Indigenous Peoples to reconnect with or extend sovereignty over ancestral items in museums requires tools in addition to repatriation. This article explores the concept of an expanded loan, which adds to the activities normally connected to a loan to include meaningful forms of Indigenous community engagement with loaned items, including ceremony and out-of-case visits/research sessions. The To Honour and Respect project, an expanded loan from the Royal Collection Trust to the Peterborough Museum and Archives in Canada, led by Hiawatha First Nation, is used as a case study to examine the possibilities and tensions raised by expanded loans.

In this article, we look at collections of Zulu beadwork at Manchester Museum and Ditsong National Museum of Cultural History tracing their provenances and social biographies. We present these two institutions as colonial museums founded on similar ideals of presenting objects as cultures of the “other” in absence of object and community agency. In rethinking colonial contexts associated with processes of collecting beadwork, we look at how these museums can be decolonized by collaborating with communities. Decolonization is deployed here as both a theory and a method toward the integration of Indigenous ways of knowing and doing in museum practices. Methodologically, the article highlights decolonial strategies in the form of open, democratic, inclusive, and multivocal engagement that we embraced undertaking the research.

A year ago, the South African Cabinet approved the National Policy of the Digitization of Arts, Culture, and Heritage. With a focus on digitizing the country's heritage resources for preservation, access, and management of ownership, this act is emblematic of a broader trend conflating digitization of Africa's cultural heritage collections with decolonization. Yet, by examining how one of the continent's oldest museums documented its ethnographic collections, this article demonstrates how normalized colonial knowledge systems still are, and why decolonization requires more than making collections digitally available. Cognizant of this challenge is Amagugu Ethu, a South African not-for-profit organization, whose work developing a digital Museum-in-a-Box I analyze in the second part of my article as an important way of resisting and interrupting colonial knowledge production in (South) Africa's museums.

Given the dramatic impact of human action on the environment, evidenced in climate change and biodiversity loss, it has been widely recognized that humanity needs to reimagine its environmental relations. Yet, the deeply entrenched separation of concepts of “culture” and “nature” in Western thought and museums forms a major impediment. Western institutions and legal frameworks define and govern sites of “natural” and/or “cultural” significance; meanwhile, museums promote “cultural” and/or “natural” heritage. Reflecting recent and ongoing efforts to deconstruct the “nature/culture” divide, and to creatively reimagine museum collections as archives of environmental knowledge, this special issue considers how the museums of the future might lead the way in reimagining and reconceptualizing human–environment relations. Advocating a cross-disciplinary approach across anthropology, the arts, and natural history, the authors explore three pressing questions: (1) As knowledge-generating institutions, how were museums historically implicated in the conceptual and actual segregation of “natural” and “cultural” knowledge, and to what extent does this continue to be the case? (2) How can we access materialized human–environment relations conserved in material things, such as Indigenous “artifacts” and “specimens,” and generate novel insights across different systems of being and knowing, such as Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies? (3) In what ways can innovative forms of scholarly engagement, curatorship, and experimental exhibitions reactivate historical collections as creative technologies, and so promote the reimagination of human–environmental relations on a larger scale?

Although such research has long been mainstream in world cultures collections, natural history museums have only recently begun tracing their colonial histories, seeking to identify individuals obscured by power imbalances, and inviting consideration of specimens as artifacts of invasion, exploitation, and extraction, as well as scientific data. This article summarizes these developments within natural history, providing possible approaches and questions. It illustrates how the costs of the colonial project experienced by people and environments were intertwined and follow similar historical processes. Equally, the vital roles natural history collections are playing in researching global environmental crises can also be played by world cultures collections. By learning from each other's disciplinary research practices, natural history and world cultures collections have huge potential to increase their social relevance.

This project challenges the division of historical collections into items that belong to the natural sciences and “cultural things.” It develops a conceptual and methodological approach to bridge this divide, which is rooted in nineteenth-century European epistemology. Two hundred years ago, two Bavarian naturalists, the zoologist Johann Baptist Spix and the botanist Carl Friedrich Philipp Martius, returned from a four-year journey through Brazil with ample items of scientific interest. Their assemblages of zoological samples, botanical specimens and ethnographic things were fundamental for the establishment of key scientific collections in Bavaria. The focus here lies on Amazonia, a region that is of great importance for stabilizing the climate on our planet due to its enormous vegetation masses. The examination of one particular ritual mask and the multiple plant materials of which it is constructed (reed, vine and bark) is carried out by intertwining anthropological, botanical, and historical strands of thought—as an approach to reimagine and reconceptualize human–environment relations. The thicket of the Amazon rainforest serves as an image for the interweaving of diverse analytical threads. These reflections on collection items and particular botanical materials are linked with reference to the past and present of two Indigenous societies living in the Amazon today: The Ticuna/Magütá and the Yanomami. The conclusion outlines a vision for a digital exhibition to present the analytical work developed in this text.

Objects in museum collections can be productively explored as repositories of environmental knowledge situated within particular cultural practices and ontologies. Research on a distinctive Munduruku headdress with its crown of golden feathers produced by tapirage—a remarkable Indigenous practice of changing the color of feathers on living parrots—opened up new ways of thinking about the intertwined relations between natural history specimens and artifacts, and between nature and culture. A comparative investigation of the headdress's materiality, construction, history, and use highlights its transformative potential, while providing insights into museum practice, international networks of exchange, and the fragmented and dispersed nature of “museum evidence.” The knowledge and power imbedded in museum collections can be reactivated through multidisciplinary research and collaboration with Indigenous knowledge holders.

This article explores how museum practices have evolved in producing knowledge, focusing on a new museum for life sciences and the environment. It proposes a curatorial practice that creates active zones of exchange, bringing together disciplines and breaking down traditional boundaries. This approach aims to produce new forms of knowledge and rethink human-environmental relations. Central to this is the reactivation of natural history collections. By weaving together a plurality of perspectives, material archives become portals into past, present and future ways of knowing. By highlighting human influence, often missing in depictions of nature, it aims to blur the lines between nature and culture. The article outlines these approaches with case studies and situates the future museum within a historical context.

The process of removing cultural material to museums can augment the “nature–culture divide” by physically separating “culture” from “nature.” In this article, I consider ways of disrupting this artificial divide through the example of a journey through my local park and an examination of the displays and collections at the nearby museum where several items from the park are now housed. By describing locations like my local park more broadly as “landscapes,” which are the collaborative products of humans and nonhumans, I hope to further disrupt the “nature–culture divide.” I also argue that experiencing “nature” and “culture” has benefited my own well-being at a particularly difficult period in my life. Reconnecting museums, their collections, and activities with the landscapes where artifacts originated could help improve the well-being of others.

Australia's vast collections of biological, natural history, ethnographic, and social-historical materials remain largely disconnected from each other and from the public. Connecting these distributed collections, currently dispersed in local, state, national, and global locales, is critically important to generate new knowledge for national and global benefit. The vision of making these collections accessible at scale, alongside innovative methodologies, and technologies of connection, has been the subject of discussion since the 1980s but has been hampered by institutional, geographic, and disciplinary silos and under-resourcing. In this article, we make an argument for a national research program that could enable the type of knowledge generation needed for a likely tumultuous twenty-first century. The Australian Museum and Galleries Association (AMAGA) report A New Conversation about Museum Research (Malde et al. 2023) has already begun to develop an argument for reimagining research collaborations so that they are aligned to shared public values. We argue that innovations in scholarship, often produced in close partnership with industry professionals, already point the way forward. What is needed now is to scale up these advancements in ways that can adequately transform the sector more broadly.

Exhibitions and accompanying publications are empowering and powerful vessels for maintaining and preserving Indigenous knowledges and practices for the more than 17 Moana Oceania diaspora communities living in Aotearoa New Zealand. We have had the honor of walking alongside two of these communities, Niue and Kiribati. For Niue, we had Molima Molly Pihigia QSM (Molly) as the Lead (on behalf of her group Falepipi he Mafola Niuean Handcraft Group Inc.) on the journey we took to develop and produce the exhibition and publication, both titled Fenoga Tāoga Niue i Aotearoa: Niue Heritage Journey in Aotearoa (Pihigia et al. 2023). The exhibition was first held at Māngere Arts Centre Ngā Tohu o Uenuku (MAC), in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland from 1 April to 20 May 2023; and then it toured to Pātaka Art + Museum, in Porirua, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, where it opened on 18 November 2023 running until 11 February 2024. With Kiribati, we were privileged to collaborate with I-Kiribati master makers Kaetaeta Watson and Louisa Humphry MNZM to co-curate the exhibition Tibuta – Kinaakiia Ainen Kiribati: Tibuta – Identifies Kiribati Women that was held at Pātaka Art + Museum from 7 October until 11 November 2023. We also helped to set up their publishing arm Te Rabakau Press and facilitated the production process of an accompanying publication, of the same name, launched at the closing of their exhibition (Lagi-Maama 2023).

With the birth of museums, came the Enlightenment idea that the contemplation of the works was an educational resource that was supposed to be available to the entire population. As a result, collections ostensibly became accessible to everyone (Bazin 1967; Cataldo and Paraventi 2007; Stermscheg 2014). Everybody could enjoy collections, whether they were curators and scholars, or not. Nevertheless, since curators and museums collected items rather carelessly, regardless of the available space, resulting in over-crowded premises, the idea of accessibility has begun to falter (Ames 1985; Crenn 2021; Ferriot 1995; Gilson 1914). Museums adopted several esthetic methods to lighten displays in order to address the unappealing presentation (Avery-Quash and Crookham 2018; Bazin 1967; Griesser-Stermscheg 2014; Murray 1904; Reinach 1909). Because many stored collections have not been displayed at all, the initial intent of their democratization has been compromised. As a result, a sizable portion of collections is accessible for study purposes for professionals only and not the general public. Therefore, the topic of stored collections and their uses has become contested since it endangers the museum's reputation as a place where anybody can access and appreciate its collections.

The recent emphasis on “space” within the sphere of conflict and peace studies has duly highlighted the urban space as a legitimate locus for investigative efforts (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel 2016, 2022). Maintaining focus on peace for this brief article, I define peace as a space-specific process in line with other theorists (e.g., Macaspac and Moore 2022). The emphasis on space is important because the material structures built on these spaces are saturated with meanings, a sense of collective identity and (collective) memories. These spatial markers can, thus, bind people across generations as imagined communities. In this sense, spaces convey meanings and a sense of connection that can be altered with the change in demographics and the consequent spatial interventions that accompany such changes. There are numerous instances of such spatial interventions after conclusions of wars where spaces are erased to either precipitate forgetting or communal segregation. Examples from the former category include destruction of heritage or architectural cleansing (e.g., Bardi 2016), while “mohallas” or the walled and gated urban communities—dotting older parts of Delhi among other parts of India—serve as examples of spatial divisions that segregate the dwellings that belong to members of different religious groups (e.g., Parveen 2016).

Communication is obviously an important function for museums. Engagement with mass media is one of the indispensable ways for museums to communicate with their publics. The concept of mass media arose in the early twentieth century and refers to information dissemination accessible to all in principle, including newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and the Internet, and others (McQuail and Deuze 2020: 16–19). In this article, mass media mainly includes the traditional mainstream media, while social media on the Internet will not be discussed. For many people, mass media is still an essential channel for up-to-date information nowadays. In recent years, the national and global mass media has paid increasing attention to museums in China, and their reports on traditional festivals, special events, museum development and International Museum Day have achieved great prominence. However, inaccuracies and negligence in mainstream media reports about museums still occur from time to time, as seen in the case of CCTV News where an author of tomb-raiding novels was invited to a live show to discuss the archaeological excavation of the Sanxingdui Site, Sichuan (The Paper 2021). While this incident invites criticism of the professional standards of journalists, it also raises skepticism about the absence of archaeologists and museum professionals in mass communication. Are museums absent from the communication process? Are museums acting as gatekeepers when reporting on relevant content? What is the relationship between museums and mass media? In this article, I argue that “agenda-setting theory” helps to address these issues.

CoMuseum is an annual conference that takes place in Athens and Thessaloniki, Greece, as well as virtually. Established in 2011, CoMuseum is “more than a conference” that aims to foster the production of collective knowledges and the facilitation of networks between culture and arts professionals from all over the world. Acting as a peer-to-peer platform for the exchange of practical knowhow, CoMuseum addresses contemporary challenges facing museums and cultural organizations and helps develop soft and hard skills for cultural professionals. Strategic thematic pillars include sustainability, the future of content, education and audience engagement, leadership, and greening, while in the past few years we have been focusing on the above through the prism of social impact and well-being. The organizing partners are the Benaki Museum, Athens, the United States Embassy, and the British Council. CoMuseum has also become a flagship program of the British Council's Museums Revisited program in the European Union.

The question of repatriation and restitution looms large in the museum world today, particularly for ethnographic museums in the former seats of empire that house culturally significant artworks and sacred objects from around the world. But beyond the question of which objects to return, and to whom, museums must also question how to display and curate materials that remain in their possession. What are museums to do with the spoils of empire neatly cataloged and carefully stored in Europe's metropoles?

In 2022, the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, organized and launched the ground-breaking exhibition Radical Stitch, North America's largest ever beadwork exhibition to feature contemporary First Nations, Métis, Inuit, and Native American artists. The exhibition, which has been awarded the 2024 Canadian Museums Association/Association des Musées Canadiens Award of Outstanding Achievement, is curated by an esteemed Indigenous curatorial team comprising Sherry Farrell Racette (University of Regina), Cathy Mattes (University of Winnipeg), and Michelle LaVallee (National Gallery of Canada) and joined a series of smaller exhibitions emerging in recent years that underscore the widespread and growing practices of beaders. Spanning two large gallery spaces, the exhibition brought together over 100 works by 48 artists from coast to coast to coast and from both sides of the imposed International Boundary dividing Canada and the United States.

Dictionary of Museology François Mairesse, ed. London, New York: ICOM and Routledge, 2023.

Dictionary of Museology François Mairesse, ed. London, New York: ICOM and Routledge, 2023.

The Exhibition and Experience Design Handbook Timothy J. McNeil. Washington, DC: American Alliance of Museums, Rowman and Littlefield, 2023.

Hoarding New Guinea: Writing Colonial Ethnographic Collection Histories for Postcolonial Futures Rainer F. Buschmann. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023.

The Anticolonial Museum: Reclaiming Our Colonial Heritage Bruno Brulon Soares. New York: Routledge, 2024.

Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat Robert Janes. New York: Routledge, 2024.

Museums and the Climate Crisis Nick Merriman, ed. Abingdon: Routledge, 2024.

Stories from Small Museums Fiona Candlin, Toby Butler, and Jake Watts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022.

Adivasi Art and Activism: Curation in a Nationalist Age Alice Tilche. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022.

It Speaks to You: Making Kin of People, Duodji and Stories in Sámi Museums Liisa-Rávná Finbog. Lewes, DE: DIOPress, 2023.

À qui appartient la beauté? Bénédicte Savoy. Paris: La Découverte, 2024.

The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Heritage, and Death Trish Biers and Katie Stringer Clary, eds. Museum and Heritage Studies Series. London: Routledge, 2024.

Chinese Museums Today Chinese Museums Association, eds. Les Ulis: EDP Sciences and Science Press, 2023.